Citadel's risk data engineering head in London joined OpenAI to work on agents
The flow of talent from hedge funds and trading firms into AI labs is not exclusively reserved for interns and new grads. Senior technologists are also in demand. In London, OpenAI has hired a senior data engineer from Citadel as one of its coveted members of technical staff (MTCs).
💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥
Tejas Sharma joined OpenAI as an MTC working on agentic infrastructure. He spent just under three years at Citadel, where he was its London-based head of data risk engineering. Before Citadel, Sharma worked across multiple tech firms; he spent five years as a staff engineer at Meta working on Instagram's machine learning architecture, and six years at financial data firm FactSet, latterly as a manager in its core services infrastructure team.
Sharma's not the first Citadel engineer to show up at a major AI lab. Gautham Thambidorai, a former MD in Citadel's core engineering team, is currently a VP at Google Deepmind. Yaqi Ji, formerly a quantitative research engineer in Citadel's global quantiative strategies group, joined OpenAI's post training inference team while serving a two-year non compete clause at Citadel. AI labs are a viable opportunity for hedge fund staff on gardening leave, but it's understood that the option to join an AI lab is not guaranteed and that it is treated as a competitor for certain roles.
OpenAI is growing fast in London. While Companies House accounts for its UK entity show that it had 55 employees at the end of 2024, LinkedIn data suggests it has more than 200 today including more than 40 members of technical staff. There are 38 more roles currently advertised in London, so hedge fund technologists looking to follow Sharma might have plenty of opportunity to do so.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: WhatsApp: http://wa.me/442079977910 (+44 20 7997 7910), Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
Photo by Berke Citak on Unsplash
